On his second album, the Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based producer interweaves industrial-strength techno and Asian instruments into a potent expression of rage and anxiety.
“Let’s get physical,” a phrase originally made famous by Olivia Newton-John and recently repurposed by Dua Lipa, could serve as the implicit throughline of Malaysian-born, Shanghai- and Taipei-based DJ Tzusing’s sophomore album, Green Hat. It’s not the physicality of polyester-clad hips and pointed fingers, nor of canoodling under a disco ball’s plasticine shimmer; it’s the heart-pounding rhythm of primal instinct, the near-eruptive thump of blood through every vessel, the adrenaline that somehow propels you those few key steps beyond hunters in pursuit. It’s the physicality that arises when words will no longer serve you: when you finally realize that you may not, in fact, have this dance.
To call Green Hat a techno album would be a disservice to the L.I.E.S. affiliate, who disavows purism. And while he may be able to directly name his influences, which range from EBM and Chicago house to the wuxia action genre, he interweaves them into a bass-driven industrial sound, along with his characteristic string instrumentation, that somehow thumps evocatively, even cinematically, rather than being defined by genres or any flouting of them. “I think about the feeling first,” he once said of his production style. And more often than not, the feeling is explosive: “You can feel like you’ve broken someone’s face without actually breaking someone’s face. Isn’t that swell?”
If you were curious about Green Hat’s title, the opening track, “Introduction,” will immediately explain: “Wearing a green hat is a Chinese symbol of a cuckold,” chirps a robotic female voice. Building on themes of cultural standards that he explored on his debut album, 2017’s Invincible East, Tzusing uses Green Hat as a vehicle to barrel straight through questions about fragile masculinity and gendered expectations. Rather than answer them directly, he simply conjures those underlying feelings of anxiety and rage, allowing them to boil over the album’s frenetic breakbeats and walloping four-to-the-floor in waspish synths, screams and growls, and clip-emptying drums. In “Take Advantage,” he even samples Daniel Plainview’s infamous “I drink your milkshake” speech from There Will Be Blood, a winkingly on-the-nose expression of destruction via machismo. Where Tzusing’s A Name Out of Place EPs and 東方不敗 (Invincible East) respectively veered more industrial and more melodic, Green Hat synthesizes these directions into a chaotic, sprawling sound; acid-inflected drum’n’bass grows satisfyingly hellish in “Exascale” before the unexpectedly ambient, Aphex Twin-esque strain of “Wear Green Hat” catches you off guard.
Here, Tzusing’s classic combination of sheet-metal drums and shapeshifting strings becomes its lushest, most dynamic, and most frightening. On lead single “Filial Endure Ruthless,” an opening twang sharpens into razor-edged synths by the song’s end. Not even an LMFAO-style “Woo!” can cut through the menace of “Interlude,” where buzzsaw bass slithers beneath a minimal, germinating synth arrangement. Despite being one of the least texturally discordant tracks, “Clout Tunnel,” featuring Suda, maintains the album’s infernal chaos: Richly layered with viscous drums, cringing squeals, and background sirens that sound enveloped in smoke, it’s like a five-alarm fire set to tape. And let’s not forget the animalistic touches—the growling, hysterical wailing, and straight-up barking that add tangible flesh and blood to steel-boned production.
Though Tzusing’s use of Asian sounds is relatively unique within techno and undeniably central to his style, it would be irresponsible to define his discography simply by its cultural context. His work is frequently discussed as an expression of“dislocation,” as if the geographical distance of his sample packs’ origins from many of the clubs he plays them in were somehow irreconcilable. And this reductive perception seems to loom: “Otherness has often been used in gimmicky ways,” he’s noted, “but then, the Westerners are now looking to Asian stuff. They want that ching-chong shit.” Tzusing’s distinctive timbres and textures aren’t just ornamental or situative, though; they’re part of a deliberate soundscape that illustrates the magnitude of feeling, rather than just explaining its cause. Green Hat is an album that urges you to let it all out, more than anything: drums that punch, strings that rend, screams that pierce because they have to, as naturally as one has to breathe. It’s not about the dislocation, or the patriarchy, or whatever million other structures make you feel like shit, but about feeling like shit in the first place, the need to scream at the top of your lungs, the urge to run away until your legs give out. No matter where those samples came from, they’re just supposed to be heard.
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